 Okay, our next speaker is, I believe, a product of Skeptic Camp that this talk was prepared for. Got great reviews, and that's why we're going to welcome Andrew Hansford. He has a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. His work involves video and thermal imaging for the military and aerospace industry. And he's also an aviation enthusiast and member of the Granite State Skeptics. So please welcome some good old-fashioned debunking. His talk is titled, The Marblehead UFO, What You Can Learn from Your Armed Chair. Please welcome Andrew Hansford. Yep, thanks, thanks. Marblehead UFO, What You Can Learn from Your Armed Chair. On the 26th of October, 2011, I'll warn an allergist and semi-professional photographer, and I say semi-professional because he does sell his photography online, went to Preston Beach in his hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts, to capture images near and around sunrise. Are they up? Can you see them there? And, you know, this is a fantastic image. We have an old anchor in the front, sitting on a beach, in the same frame as an island off in front of the sunrise. Meanwhile, we have a very unusual cloud situation. There's clouds overhead, but there's a cloud break in the distance. So we have light streaming in underneath the clouds, and the clouds to the east of this location are lit up from beneath. So remember some of those details will be important, and it's hard to go back. But while he was processing his photographs, he noticed a white speck in the left side of several of the shots. Can you see the speck? It's sometimes hard to see. Now he says that the speck stayed there for a while in one position, and then sped off to the right. So he put together 10 of these frames and put this up on his blog, zoomed in on just the area we see, and this is where the result. As you'll see, in the first few frames, it doesn't move too much, stays about where it is, and then moves rapidly off to the right. Now one of the problems with this animation is, is 10 frames. We don't know the actual interval between when the photographs were taken, and we don't know how long each exposure of this is. So it's really hard to tell what the precise movement of the object was, but it does look like there's definitely an object moving over Massachusetts Bay that morning. Now this story was picked up in the local paper after he posted this animation in the photograph, and it was hyped up, you know, defies easy explanation. Well, to me it looked like an airplane, you know, in the distance lit up from the side because that's what airplanes look like at the sunrise or sunset, they're lit from the side and off the top, but the unusual situation here is there's clouds over it. But, you know, with only a single photograph, what information can we gather about this to support that argument? It's an airplane. We can just say, hey, you know, that's an airplane, what are you talking about, guy? Or we can say, well, Occam's razor says the simplest explanation, that's an aircraft of some sort. But that's kind of, doesn't literally leave us where much to go, but, but what do we do? What do we say? Do we just shrug it off? Do we let other people speculate that this is possibly alien activity? Or maybe a secret military weapon? Or perhaps even something more spiritual in nature? Well, so let's start with what we have. The photographer's account. Now this is from the photographer's blog and photo blog, and we see it and it's hard to see, but he says, hey, you woke up in the morning, it was 6.30, he looked at the sky, looked great, he wanted to take this kind of photograph, and he says, once I was there, I shot dawn light exposure of the anchor in brilliant sky. In order to capture the incredible dynamic range in the scene, I actually took, he says six images in this paragraph at shutter speeds ranging from one-eighth to a full eight seconds. In the next paragraph, he says he has 16 exposures that each took as little as a half a second to a full eight seconds. He combined those and put those into his animation. So now we have the local story by Amy Stoltzman in something called Wicked Local, which is covering the Marblehead area. And the title of the story was, UFO Marble Recent Sightings Define Easy Explanation. This article had it all except for baffled scientists. And what we get here is, this is great. We get that the photographic timeline starts at 6.58.36, according to Oren, and it extends up to 7 a.m. So now we have a pretty precise time about where the animation took place and where the photographs were taken. So, Pressing Beach and Marblehead, now where is it? So the first image there you'll see is Massachusetts Bay, and Marblehead is north of Boston, what they call the North Shore. And as we zoom in, we can see there's the island in the middle image. That's called Ram Island off of Preston Beach. And we zoom into the beach and you can see the rock formation. Now that's where the anchor is. The red marker is where I was first trying to place the camera. The green marker is actually where the photographer said, that's where he set up his tripod. He gave me that information in an email exchange when I was first posing this, and that's the place we'll use for further analysis. So what was the atmospheric conditions like then? Well, we go to the NOAA solar calculator at this URL and we find out that sunrise at this location on that date, October 26, 2011, was 7.09. So the photographs have taken about 10 minutes before actual sunrise. So the light in is glare from the sunrise but not actual sun rays yet. Now we get an extra bonus from this. The green line in graph is the angle out of the sunrise from the location. And if you'll notice, that angle goes right over the anchor, which is the center of the photograph. So we can use this line as the approximate center line of where the camera was pointing. So now we know where the camera was, pretty much where it's pointing. All right, so how about those clouds overhead? That object must be beneath the clouds. It can't be above the clouds. In those clouds, pretty much covered to the horizon going south, so it can't be too far south. It looks like it's right over the bay. So how do we know how high those clouds are? Well, every airport issues a weather report every hour. And these are called NETAR. So I went to this website at the Flemish State to get to the historic NETAR data for that day. And for KBOS, which is for Boston Logan Airport, we see at, and you'll say time was 10.54. Well, what's that 10.54? NETARs are listed in UTC. So UTC is four hours in advance of eastern daylight time. So this weather report actually came out at 6.54 a.m., four to ten minutes before the animation photograph. So this is fairly fresh data. And all these numbers, what comes down translated to is, yeah, it was 49 degrees. We had light winds from the west. Now, the last column in the NRC is coverage. Overcast, and the next, the last one, you say the ceiling. That's where the bottoms of the clouds were. 70, that's in hundreds of feet. Those clouds were at 7,000 feet. That object must be below 7,000 feet. So if I think it's a plane, what planes were in the area? Well, this is one of my favorite sites to look at a plane. It's called passure.com. They're an independent company that sells tracking data of aircraft to airliners and to airports. And several airports around the country, not just Boston, pay for this service and put it up on web pages so you can see live radar of the aircraft in the area going in and out of that airport and also transiting over the area. And what's nice about this, not only do you get live, but it has about two weeks of history. Now, this was one of my first mistakes. I didn't capture the history for that day before it was erased. But here you can see an example. And what we have is the planes leaving that airport are in green. The planes going into that airport are in blue. We have black airplanes that are transitioning. And you can select an individual craft. It'll turn it red. And what the information it gives us, it gives us the flight ID, you know, the airline and flight number. It gives us the aircraft type. It's the current speed and altitude of that aircraft. It tells us where the aircraft originated its journey and where it's going in the end. This is a great site. It's fun to watch the planes here. I use it all the time to see, oh, I don't know where that plane is. So using this toy, I identified this particular flight. JetBlue flight 1250. It left Dallas at 6 o'clock a.m. It was into Boston at 7 o'clock a.m. Now, the great thing about FlightAware, and some of you might have seen it on the news recently, was that it gives you all the information about a particular flight, including the ground track, which you can zoom in on, which I said zoomed in on here over Massachusetts. But it also, on the bottom, you can see it shows a profile of the altitude and speed of the flight for the entire flight. And what you'll see here, that this JetBlue flight 1250, its ground track takes it over Massachusetts Bay. It turns to its left, flies almost directly at the beach on the North Shore. So it would appear to an observer standing there that it was moving very little, like something coming at you straight like this, turns left to make final into runway 27 in Boston, and then moves something like that. So this is an Embraer ERJ 190. So, here's what we have so far. We have where the camera is pointing and the flight of this aircraft that matches what we would expect the motion to match. But there's one question left. Will this aircraft, if it's on that flight path, be in the field of view of the camera? Now, we could examine the pictures and try to look, you know, if we measure it here and do some Google Maps, but there's a simpler way. The camera field of view can be determined very simply that if you know what is under the focal length and that's the distance between the objective lens and the imager and the size of the imager, some simple trigonometry will tell you the field of view of the camera. And so this imager used to be a piece of film and now it's a piece of electronics. And you're saying, okay, well, this is a compound lens system but there's still something called the effective field of view. But where do I get these numbers? Well, every photograph has metadata and stored in it and called EXIF data. And this is extra non-image-related data that's stored there by, originally, by the camera and also by any tool that you use to open up the picture. Now, a lot of times this metadata is removed on the web but on this picture that we saw up front, it was still there. And I used this website, the RegExon Info EXIF CGI, fed it to that and it spilled out that this picture was taken with a Canon U S50D. It tells me the serial number of that camera. It tells me that the lens used was an EF S15 55mm lens. It tells me that this particular picture was taken on the camera time at 6.58. It tells me that the ISO was 100, that this exposure was 2 and, yes, the focal length is 33mm. It tells me the focal length. Okay, it didn't tell me what the size of the imager was but it does tell me what the camera is. It's a Canon EOS 50D. You say, you do a web search on Canon EOS 50D imager and you get a lot of technical information about the piece of silicon in there including its size, which is 22.3mm wide. So plugging in the 33mm focal length, 22.3mm wide image, you get a 37.3 degree field of view. That's what the camera was looking at. So we combine all this. Here is a marker of where the camera was and approximately where it was pointing. We overlay the flight path of the aircraft and then we put on the field of view. And we see that the aircraft's flight path intersects the field of view. This is the aircraft. Huge database of aircraft imagery like this. Now I don't know if this is the exact aircraft because JetBlue only keeps that data around for 90 days and I didn't even think to ask the people I know at JetBlue until a year and a half later. But this is an ERJ 190 in JetBlue livery. This database here, you can look up almost any type of aircraft for any type of any air force or any airliner and you can search for any location. If you know the specific registration number or tail number of an aircraft, you can look up that individual aircraft in this database. As a matter of fact, last week, I looked up a photograph at San Francisco of AirAsiana, the same exact aircraft taking off from San Francisco a couple of years ago. But what we know is this plane is painted white, so it would be more reflective, was over Massachusetts Bay that morning. We know that this aircraft, none of it was over Massachusetts Bay. It was over Massachusetts Bay at the right time. We know it was over Massachusetts Bay following a flight path that would explain the motion we saw in the photograph. We know that this flight path intersects the field of view at the right time when the camera was taken. This aircraft should be in that photograph and if it's not that white dot, then JetBlue is missing an airplane. I posted on the blog site, Wednesday's a Marblehead for this photograph. If you want to check out some great photography of a coastal New England town, Wednesday's a Marblehead is the photographer's website. He was cooperative in my investigation. I'd like to thank Reed for making me commit to this presentation. I'd like to thank the Granite State Skeptics and the Cape Van Skeptics for letting me do this presentation for them. I'd like to thank Captain Michael Robs and Dr. Stuart Robbins for their input and feedback. Thank you, Professor Hall. Thank you, Jay Ref for the opportunity to do these papers. Thank you, James Randy for everything. And thank you guys for showing up early on a Sunday morning to hear this. Remember. Thank you, Andrew and we have time for a couple questions. Kitty. I'm just here to show you that I did wake up on a Sunday morning and show up for you to talk like I promised. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anybody wants to show some love? Do you have any issues with the... This is an excellent investigation, but do you have any problems explaining to people the density of information and how do you... Do you have to simplify things sometimes for people who kind of tune you out after a while? Well, I think this particular case was fairly straightforward. You know, you have one light over in the image at a time. It was very simple. It lined up exactly with an airplane that was in the area. So this one, no. If I looked on the database and saw that there was no planes in the area that explained that thought, I probably would have just went, well, don't know what that is and moved on. Any other questions? Thank you very much, Andrew.